Ken Oh wrote:Vigorous does not cure poison, at least not for me. Also, respawning after dying doesn't cure poison either. This really makes the Undead path the only playable one at the moment.
It doesn't technically cure it but it is supposed to at least partially counteract it. I guess I haven't looked that closely.
The castle bonuses do clear poison but dying doesn't, oops. I'll fix that.
Ken Oh wrote:Teleport: Does this even work? I haven't figured out how to use it.
None of the menu commands worked in the original download (I used an out-of-date directory when including the file I macroed them away in
) The current download should have it fixed, or you can just edit Arena.cfg and remove the extraneous /Heroes_Arena/ directory in the first line (it should just read {./commands.cfg} ).
Ken Oh wrote:I think the upgrade options have obvious groupings. You have stat upgrades (strength, dex, movement, toughness, etc.), combat abilities/skills (berserk, charge, backstab, etc.), terrain upgrades (movement and defense bonuses), "class path" upgrades, and so on. There are some stray ones that might not fit into anything else, like Vigorous, but you can maybe put that with stat upgrades. Either way, just kind of grouping those together, if you can, will make a big difference.
Okay by me. At some point I suppose I ought to make little icons for each group to help differentiate them, too, rather than just having copied the little heart icon for everything...
Ken Oh wrote:About the elf being underpowered. The reason for this has to do with a suggestion I have below. It's not because of a lack of skills, it's because having a strong ranged weapon is nothing like having a strong melee weapon. I'm currently on turn 161 (it's going very slowly at this point, and my laptop is getting really hot) and my human managed one kill on his turn, but then on the enemy's turn 13 of them attacked and died (not to mention everyone surrounding me is near death). What this means is a human and get attacked and gain massive exp, level up and heal quickly. Elves, on the other hand, get pounded but earn little in the way of exp.
Well, there's another reason too. The human hero has a built-in ability which I just called "heroic" which is a really crappy regen ability (2 HP per turn and does nothing to counter poison at all). The intent was to give this to all the player characters to extend their longevity a bit but I accidentally left it off the elf which was leaving them awfully short.
Even so, I know elves are less efficient at killing enemies. They get around a lot more easily, though, which is supposed to be the trade-off.
Ken Oh wrote:About Undead line being too powerful. I think rather than lowering resistances I would try lowering melee attack power and get them to focus on
Aw, you got cut off. I just know you had a really great suggestion here, too. Don't leave me hanging!
The one problem with lowering melee attack power is that AMLA [event]s are one-time effects. Right now I have Discorporation (which is where resistances get really crazy) reduce melee strength by 25%, but the thing is, if you pick up Discorporation before any strength boosts it'll just knock you down from 6-4 to 5-4 and then you can pump it back up to 11-4 (compared to 12-4 max for non-undead characters).
Then again, I guess I could attach a weapon special to take off a fixed percentage of damage, although that doesn't show up as clearly in the AMLA dialog. I guess a lot of effects aren't shown very clearly there anyhow so I might as well.
Ken Oh wrote:I don't think the map is too big. I think it's perfect. Also, I think the castle system is great.
It occurs to me that the castle bonuses scale a bit too rapidly, though. I originally set them to increase by such great big chunks (at least in single player; with more than 1 player the value jumps up every time any player gets a castle bonus, but to compensate it increases in much smaller increments when there are multiple players around) because at the time it was really quite difficulty to hit more than 2 or 3 bonuses and I wanted it to be worth the effort, however at the current rate once you manage to get a 4th or so bonus you're getting so much gold from each castle bonus that you're basically immortal. Since posting the original version I've had several "runaway" scenarios where I would get a castle bonus and have my gold go shooting up, I'd run along the outside edge to the next castle, and maybe I'd reach it or maybe I'd just get killed. If I got killed, I'd respawn in the center, but all the enemies would be piled up against the side of the arena where I just died... so I'd run in the opposite direction and claim a bonus at the third castle without any opposition.
Basically you reach a point by turn 50 or 60 where every castle just about gets you enough points to buy a respawn, and every time you respawn you're positioned with a clear road to one of the castles... I didn't play past turn 80 or so, so I suppose eventually enough enemies start spawning that you won't have a very clear run after you respawn. But then again by that point you can have 10 move and be getting through most terrain for 1 or ocassionally 2 move points...
Since the gold from killing enemies is 1/4 the XP from killing enemies, maybe I should make the castle bonus only give 1/4 as much gold as it does XP (currently it adds the same to both). Or maybe the respawn cost should scale upwards too, so every time you die you need more points to respawn? Maybe both?
Ken Oh wrote:Here where I think you go wrong. There are just too many enemies and for a couple reasons:
1. You don't want to be playing this all day. It can take you hours to get to the point where you start seeing Skeletal Dragons,Sea Serpents and Yetis, and that's just single player. You are very literally going to be there all day if you play with a friend or two.
True. I figured the individual turns are pretty short but once I started getting longer games going I did find that the sheer number of enemies bogs things down a bit.
Ken Oh wrote:2. Mobility is too low. You can get permanently trapped too easily, even if you are killing the 14 enemies a round like I said I was. And, if you're playing with a friends, backstab becomes useless when you can't even move one space over, let alone behind an enemy. If you're worried about players being able to constantly outrun enemies, don't. In turn-based games like this it's always way easier to catch someone who is trying to get around you than it is to get around someone (it's different than real-time strat in that way). Mobility is a huge part of the Wesnoth's strat.
Yeah, I know. The one problem is that the castle bonuses are already a potential problem and fewer enemies would just make things worse. I can always tone down the rate of castle bonuses, though.
Ken Oh wrote:OK,
here I took a screenshot of where I respawned on round 170. I quit there because I know I will never be able to move away from that area, or even move to better terrain. But it's not just like that on round 170. It's like this most of the way through.
I guess by that point I ought to just have some kind of proper "win condition"... by the look of things you're to the point where you're getting a level 4 monster every round. But I do know the feeling of things getting a bit overcrowded even before that point...
Ken Oh wrote:I suggest having enemies spawn slower but make them get harder quicker. That way you could actually travel around but sometimes you would have no choice but to fight. Also, I think it would be neat to have an occasional enemy spawn that is way tougher than the rest. Players might choose to avoid it until they get stronger and can take it on.
There is some variety in spawn difficulty already... every 4th turn it produces slightly harder spawns, every 8th turn it produces spawns that are slightly harder than that, then every 16th turn it produces even harder spawns, and so on. It's not especially noticeable unless you're looking really closely, though. (The exact jump in difficulty on these turns depends on how many players are playing; turn 128 is the biggest increment I bother tracking, and at that point, in a single player game it produces a unit that is tougher by
not quite a full unit level.)
Maybe I could use a similar system for quantity as well as quality. I don't want to go lower than 1 enemy per turn, but maybe I could have it spawn extras only on every 3rd turn or something like that, rather than just spawning more and more units on every turn.
Ken Oh wrote:Also, maybe you can decrease/increase the spawn rate depending on how many players there are (just don't do it the way Colosseum did it, because you could put player 2 as empty and just put more players after that and it would only spawn player 1's enemies). Not sure if you've done this though.
This already happens. Which means you probably don't want to see what 6 player games are like...
Actually it's not quite so bad because the spawns still only increase 1 at a time. In one player mode you start out at 1 enemy per turn and increase to 2 per turn at turn 10 or so... with six players it starts out at 6 and increases to 7 at that point. So after a while you're facing about 1.5x to 2x as many enemies, but with six times as many heroes to deal with them.
I suspect the balance is all goofy with respect to different number of players just because so many parts of the spawning algorithm change in so many diffierent ways. (More players face more enemies, but the additional enemies aren't as powerful, but you get to more powerful monsters faster, etc.) Basically more players means enemies are stronger both in quality AND in quantity (although not all at the same time) but it'll take some playtesting before I have the proportions right, especially considering all the abilities which only really work with multiple players...
Ken Oh wrote:One more suggestion: I think you should do something about enemies attacking after you respawn in the center. I've gotten taken down to 1/3 HP just from a turn of enemies attacking before I got to control anything. Maybe move the unit somewhere safe in a dark area before putting him back into the center.
Sounds reasonable enough.
Ken Oh wrote:Again, very fun and I can't wait for it to get better. If you want to use any abilities I have made for the in-progress
Abilities Era, please feel free to do so.
Thanks for all the feedback! I have looked at some of the Abilities Era stuff and do plan to do some things which will at least be similar to some of those ideas. I haven't gotten much into abilities/specials which run off of event triggers but at this point I'm fairly confident in handling WML and do plan on getting to some of that stuff soon.
